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06 July 2010

Patio Garden Experiment: Part I

We used to have a raised garden on the sunny southeast side of the house. Then my husband decided to dismantle it for the house's short stint as rental property. After we moved back in we decided to try something new. As mentioned in a previous post about Swiss Chard, we have planted vegetables in our existing flower beds. This has been tricky since our flower beds are finally lush-ing out and providing those shady areas that we were starving for in years past! One of our solutions has been to attempt a patio tomato and herb garden. We realize that tomato plants generally do better in the ground, but why not try?

Someday we'll have the beautiful ceramic pots, handmade by local artisans...but for now, hand-me-downs will do! Reduce.Reuse.Recycle, right?

You may see more than a few blogs about tomatoes since I'm just so excited about the variety we're trying! Angie Ott at Birdsong had such an amazing list to choose from. We had to limit ourselves to 8 pots! Here's the list of heirloom and open-pollinated plants that we are experimenting with this year (8 tomato, 2 basil). We went for variety of color, size and container-friendly:

* Sophie's Choice

* Cream Sausage (aka Banana Cream)

* Japanese Black Trifele

* Cherokee Purple

* Arkansas Traveler

* Green Zebra

* Riesentraube

* Yellow Pear

* Sweet Genovese Basil

* Lime Basil (our new FAVORITE!!)

I'm going to let you know which ones faired best – which tomato made our favorite list for flavor, and which plant gave us the production for canning. As a bonus, I've included the photo of our volunteers in the compost pile. Yes...they are going to be the best producers in our yard! This IS the Volunteer State, you know.